Ann Marlowe

www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-07-17/the-war-over-the-war-among-republicans/2/

The Republican Fight Over Afghanistan
by Ann Marlowe
July 17, 2010 | 7:33pm

BS Top – Marlowe Afghanistan US soldiers walk to board a helicopter at an airfield in Kandahar on May 14, 2010. Credit: Tauseef Mustafa / Getty Images As Hillary Clinton heads to Kabul for an international conference on security, a civil war has erupted in the Republican Party over Afghanistan.

In recent weeks, Republicans have fought among themselves over the war in Afghanistan.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele ignited the furor by disavowing the war as President Obama’s folly. That comment was sharply attacked by Sen. John McCain and others, questioning Steele’s ability to lead the party.

William Kristol took Steele’s remark as “an affront, both to the honor of the Republican Party, and to the commitment of the soldiers fighting to accomplish the mission they’ve been asked to take on by our elected leaders.”

Newt Gingrich may never be his party’s presidential nominee, but speaking on Afghanistan this week, he showed the political courage—and intellectual sophistication—I hope for from our 2012 candidate.

The former House Speaker cautioned that it wasn’t quite so simple, saying that “counterinsurgency doctrine doesn’t go deep enough for some place like Afghanistan. You’re dealing with Afghan culture that is fundamentally different than us, in ways we don’t understand.”

I wish more Republicans would follow suit, neither claiming support for the war as a litmus test for Republican loyalty nor, like Steele, disowning the war as the Democrats’ problem.

Patriotism means that we must support our troops while they’re in Afghanistan—but not that we must agree that they should be there, or that they’re doing the right things. There’s nothing wrong with being a Republican and being deeply skeptical about our war strategy.

Many of the American soldiers I know in Afghanistan are themselves deeply skeptical of the American non-strategy. And many of these soldiers are Republicans. They often find themselves “enacting governance on the local level,” in the words of Captain Mike Tumlin of the 82nd Airborne, trying to sideline or remove Afghan officials who steal from, or murder and rape the very people they’re supposed to serve, only to see their hard and sometimes bloody work brought to naught by corrupt higher-ups in Kabul. They’re not fighting for a good government against the evil Taliban, but for one evil against another.

Michael Steele was foolish to try to position Afghanistan as a Democratic mistake. But he is also wrong to believe Afghanistan was unwinnable from the start.

In his speech this week, Gingrich got to the heart of the problem. We’ve been applying counterinsurgency doctrine (and that haphazardly), assuming that the people are the center of gravity. Win the people over to support their government and you win the war. But if counterinsurgency is “a war of perceptions,” to use a phrase favored by ousted General Stanley McChrystal, it behooves us to understand how Afghans perceive things.

As Newt says, we don’t.

Many American observers were shocked when Dr. Abdullah Abdullah dropped out of the runoff election with President Hamid Karzai this November. It seemed irresponsible and wrong. But Afghan supporters of the opposition candidate—whom I admire—explained to me that in Afghan terms, a candidate who couldn’t “protect” his supporters’ votes was likely to lose their support. Even if Abdullah lost the second round because Karzai repeated his massive fraud, his supporters would blame him, just as an Afghan father might kill his daughter if she is raped, because that fact alone brings dishonor on the family.

We don’t understand, and we may not be so good at predicting how the Afghans will respond to our actions.

We’ve spent $51.5 billion to date on the Afghan war, about four years’ worth of that country’s GDP—enough to give every Afghan $2,000 to $2,500. About half of our expenditure has gone to standing up the Afghan National Security Forces. That $25 billion also equals the entire Israeli defense budget for two years.

For what we’ve spent, we could have re-created the Israeli Army, Air Force and Navy in Afghanistan. Only we didn’t. Instead, at enormous cost, we have fielded a marginally competent army and a barely capable police force, both of which lose between 25 percent and 70 percent of their men annually. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal recently reported that more than $3 billion has been openly flown out of Kabul Airport since 2007.

What we have in Afghanistan is a counterinsurgency strategy of tactics. COIN is a set of tactics: station your troops among the people, conduct a lot of meetings with tribal elders to find out what bribes they want, protect them from the insurgents, connect them with their officials—every private knows the mantra. But COIN is not a strategy.

Strategy requires a political vision. Throughout history, counterinsurgency has barely worked when conducted by a government with substantial popular support. It is much more of a challenge, when the government, like Karzai’s, lacks almost all support.

Why should Republicans tolerate waste of our tax money, merely because it happens in Afghanistan? Exactly which Republican values do the Karzai brothers—merchants in drugs and explosives, skimmers of contracts and runners of protection rackets—exemplify? Why is it honorable for Republicans to sacrifice the best of our young people for a miserable kleptocracy?

A reckoning is overdue.

President Obama said Wednesday that he didn’t fire Gen. Stanley McChrystal over policy disagreements. Too bad.

Almost every metric measuring military progress in Afghanistan has gone downhill since McChrystal took command a year ago, as an April Pentagon report detailed. More recently, a UN report revealed that incidents involving improvised-explosive devices — the main killer of our troops — rose 94 percent in the first four months of 2010 over a year earlier.

It’s notable that one of the few strong statements of support for McChrystal came from Afghanistan’s most notorious crime boss — whom McChrystal had claimed as an indispensable US ally: Ahmed Wali Karzai. AWK, the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, told The New York Times: “We are asking the decision-makers to send him back to Afghanistan.”

US troops carrying a critically wounded fellow soldier to a waiting MEDEVAC copter outside Kandahar yesterday.

McChrystal put America’s eggs in the wrong basket. He had to postpone the much-touted “Kandahar offensive” when his “ally” AWK decided to withdraw his support for it.

But then, he has been using “a strategy of tactics,” as West Point history professor Col. Gian Gentile calls the fashionable new American way of war.

Yes: The counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) that’s been our guide in Afghanistan is a tactic, not a strategy — just as the Afghan “surge” McChrystal lobbied for was a tactic. Which raises the vital question: What is the US strategy in Afghanistan?

Under McChrystal, it seemed to amount to hoping that AWK would calm Kandahar for us — even if, as I detailed in a recent Foxnews.com exposé, he also sold the very explosives that are used to kill American soldiers.

McChrystal fell into the trap of thinking that COIN tactics would add up to victory. But I’ve seen US Army units following these tactics in southern and eastern Afghanistan since the summer of 2007. We’ve stationed men in small outposts among the population, we’ve held endless shuras with Afghan elders, we’ve spent endless American dollars on “armed social work.” And southern and eastern Afghans still plant IEDs on the asphalt roads we provided, and burn down the schools we built them — and in many areas respect the Taliban’s (shadow) government more than President Karzai’s.

The Afghan war is winnable, but not the way we’re fighting it.

First, counterinsurgency has never worked unless a good percentage of the population supports the government — and that’s no longer so in Afghanistan. We botched a chance to gain a reliable Afghan partner, presidential challenger Dr. Abdullah, when we let Karzai steal the election last August. But the Karzais have to go, now.

Probably the best way is to prosecute AWK for his many crimes and hope that his brother will flee. (A US anti-corruption team is said to be closing in on another Karzai brother, businessman Mahmoud, even now.) The Karzai cartel is hollowing out the Afghan state for its personal gain. If some of his brothers are jailed, it’s likely Hamid will flee.

Second, Afghanistan is winnable only if the Afghan National Police and Army can take responsibility for security. Progress has been glacial.

Just one of Afghanistan’s 360 police districts can operate without US help, and just 14 more are rated at the top grade for those requiring oversight — the same as in 2009. Far too many officers quit — 16,000 last year. And in the last year, there has been no rise in the number of Afghan army battalions rated at the highest functional level.

Penny-pinching is certainly not the problem: The $11.6 billion appropriated for training the Afghan police and army isn’t far off Israel’s 2008 defense budget of $12 billion.

One factor eroding the Afghan police is poor local governance, something that our troops on the ground struggle with daily. Some of this can be corrected by replacing the crooks at the top of the Afghan state.

The answer isn’t more troops or money, it’s the moral courage to show the Afghan people that another way is possible, and that we believe in it. McChrystal seemed determined to show the Afghans that we believed only in the power of their mafias.

McChrystal’s replacement, his boss and mentor Gen. David Petraeus, must make it clear to Pakistan that our allies have to act like allies. McChrystal was an enabler of the two-faced Pakistanis, who both clamor for more American aid, yet funnel support to the Afghan insurgency.

In short, the replacement of McChrystal could be the best news to come out of Afghanistan for a while — if it provokes the administration to re-examine our Afghan war in time to start winning it again.